Posted December 16, 2020
Since GOG won't let me post a review where it ought to be, this is the only place I can do it. I apologize for my length even though it's preliminary and I don't go through everything thouroughly as I would like to...but here goes...
The complaints most people have regarding bugs, glitches, and the like I can personally attest to; I couldn't agree more, and yet there is a lot more to say:
The design of the game itself is at fault: there's no RPG in this RPG. The story drags you from one mission to another, the three starting prologues all lead to the same place with the same beats, no matter your life-path, your V will act like the same streetwise edgelord so even your character creation doesn't matter. There are no real dialogue choices, and even when you do they always lead to the same scripted outcome; you have one dialogue option and some optional chit chat below it.
The characters are all forgettable and it's often unclear why you're supposed to care about the missions. Person A wants item X but Person B wants you to screw over Person A, etc. At no point did I feel any connection to anybody or any sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing. Someone tell CDPR that edgy is not a personality. The dialogue is also wooden, bland, and gives me no reason to care. The antagonist (if you can even call him that), Johhny Silverhand, is poorly handled: because of the lack of actual development of the RPG elements, your interactions with him are stale and repetitive, as in the same point of conflict is gone over, seemingly resolved, and then addressed again.
It is ridiculous the PC release isn't lambasted for piss-poor performance by reviewers (mainstream urinalists excluded because their opinion isn't worth the excrement they sniff to come up with their opinions). I refuse to believe the accounts of apologist randoms when I have seen with my own eyes Dr. Disrespect, live on his Twitch stream, with the best PC build a man of his wealth can buy, only run the game at barely 100 FPS at medium to high settings at 1920x1080 resolution (he has a RTX 3090 btw)...pathetic. On every platform the game is sold on, the recommended graphics card is a GTX 1060, NOT MINIMUM, but RECOMMENDED. So apparently CDPR thinks the base experience is the aforementioned 30-50 FPS with graphics and rendering looking like something out of the previous century. To summarize, the game is poorly optimized regardless of PC rig, and the fault lies with the developer and publisher, not the consumer for believing the advertised specs (as the apologists would have you believe).
The world itself is impressive... not. The game is one of the worst optimized for PC in recent memory (and I've played Arkham Knight on release and a couple of the recent Assassin's Creed games), so you can't even experience and appreciate the game aesthetically. I have the PC components recommended by CDPR themselves, and my game runs on average 30-40 fps; 50 fps if I'm looking at the ground. At a certain point you realize it's all an elaborate farce; you can barely talk to any civilians and they just mindlessly walk straight ahead. No interactions or cool moments like in GTA, RDR, or even the likes of Skyrim and Fallout 4. Speaking of which, it is embarrassing that a game like Skyrim, released almost a decade ago, has exciting random events, like a thief trying to rob you or an assassin trying to ambush you, or the Dark Brotherhood sending you an ominous message after you nick one of their kills. Things like that bring weight to your choices, and honestly, playing through CB2077 only reminded me of older and better RPGs and games in general (Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect Trilogy, Witcher 3, Divinity Original Sin II, Deus Ex, KotoR 1 and 2, etc.). From what I have heard, there was a lot of content (including missions, characters, story arcs, entire game mechanics, etc.) that was cut from release; to what extent, I do not know, but I imagine it would be a lot...
Regarding NPC's and the world, if you shoot your gun in a crowd, for example, dozens of NPCs go into an identical crouching animation, and the cops can be defeated by standing against a wall as they always spawn behind you. It never feels like you're in a living in a tangible and ostensible world, but something like the Matrix: surrounded by lifeless automatons with predestined fates, which just breaks whatever immersion there is left to peddle. There is not even an attempt made to make the world and its occurrences seem spontaneous. Not to mention, many bugs and glitches prevent the player from finishing quests (sounds like a Bethesda experience, but at least on PC they provided the player with console commands and the tools to get past that in some way; the beautiful modding community also helped A LOT). All the aforementioned and more, break the verisimilitude of the game that was, as an advertised RPG, supposed to be VERY immersive.
The gameplay is unsatisfying and underwhelming. There's a heavy focus on gunplay but none of the guns themselves feel satisfying, because of the existence of a meta in a game that forces you to adopt certain playstyles over another: hacking is pointless and clunky, stealth is frustratingly near-impossible to pull off, and more.
And the endings...my god...what a way to invalidate every choice you made to get to the end:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*SPOILERS*
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The game has every single ending with the player dead and in despair (or alluded to dying at best). So much for a choice-dependent RPG, none of your choices have a meaningful or fulfilling impact on the setting or the people in it, let alone your own fate. The endings are more pointless than in Mass Effect 3 and even then, Bioware wanted to make amends and released an update to give an ending where Shepard survives (among other things). Before the curfuffle that was the ME 3 ending, it still drew more from player choices than CB2077: when your Shepard charged into the jaws of the enemy, your allies wanted you to survive, if you got an ending where you died, your lover grieved, and if your Shepard survived your friends missed you. The allies you gathered joined the battle, and despite EA's meandering, Bioware managed something wonderful. Does CB2077 have anything resembling such emotion derived from art? No.
This is a horrible game however way you slice it: gameplay, all aspects of writing, graphics, etc, all a huge disappointment and flawed at a design level. Apologists will keep defending these corporations and the corps will continue to sell us broken cars and try to fix them while we're test-driving. We must stand on our principles and call out anti-consumerist manure wherever and whenever it surfaces.
It's ridiculous that an attempt at a "true RPG" has less RPG elements than "The Witcher 3", a game released by the same company, with a character whose gender, race, moral alignment (for the most part), background, physique and general appearance, are already decided for you!
Mass Effect, a game released over a decade ago, gives you 2 instances with 3 choices each to customize your history and background before you even start the story, and unlike character customization in CB2077, in ME they actually affect your game experience, including but not limited to: giving characters unique dialogue when commenting on your achievements, unique dialogue for certain quests, and even a unique quest altogether depending on your choices; CB2077 gives you 3 "lifepaths" that simply amount to how you got into the city and nothing more.
Given alone that the CDPR list of possible spec configurations all run subpar, and nowhere resemble the footage we've seen, I'd say there is an argument to sue CDPR for false advertisement, but I don't have the money unfortunately. Perhaps I'll start with the $60 that I'll have once my refund goes through (been a week already).
If you don't have a good story, with interesting characters and intertwining plots and conflicts that you can become invested in, no immersive drama or brilliant voice acting...if you don't have good gameplay, or cool periodical gimmicks that can keep you engaged...if you don't have characters that you can fall in love with, hate, adore, admire, or respect...if you don't have any of that or not enough thereof, then how can we possibly, honestly, verily, call this botched abortion of a project a good game?
It would certainly seem, that no amount of patches or updates to fix the bugs and glitches will truly fix the game, because it is broken in terms of design of the written narrative and gameplay; to fix those two would require a rework from the ground up, a new game entirely...
A human can theoretically be entertained by anything (as evidenced by the glowing reviews from apologist hacks over the years, not just for this game) but that is no excuse for poor work. Why should we settle for mediocrity (or in this case hot garbage on a rotten leaf) when we know better that great art is preferable and possible? We have already done it better before for fuck's sake...more than once. Avatar the Last Airbender (the show) is a children's show but it's still written, directed, and acted well so that the children that grow up and learn from it, as well as newcoming adults, can look back fondly and still be entertained. Will the fundamental gameplay faults that are not as a result of abysmal optimization still be entertaining in the future? Will a contrived plot, stale characters, lackluster antagonist, lifeless world, and gameplay that skews you into a particular meta...be something you want to remember and invest your time in?
"Art dies when we forget why it must live."
God help us all if this is the future...because I don't like it. The Emperor has no clothes, and I'm tired of people telling me he does.
The complaints most people have regarding bugs, glitches, and the like I can personally attest to; I couldn't agree more, and yet there is a lot more to say:
The design of the game itself is at fault: there's no RPG in this RPG. The story drags you from one mission to another, the three starting prologues all lead to the same place with the same beats, no matter your life-path, your V will act like the same streetwise edgelord so even your character creation doesn't matter. There are no real dialogue choices, and even when you do they always lead to the same scripted outcome; you have one dialogue option and some optional chit chat below it.
The characters are all forgettable and it's often unclear why you're supposed to care about the missions. Person A wants item X but Person B wants you to screw over Person A, etc. At no point did I feel any connection to anybody or any sense of why I'm doing what I'm doing. Someone tell CDPR that edgy is not a personality. The dialogue is also wooden, bland, and gives me no reason to care. The antagonist (if you can even call him that), Johhny Silverhand, is poorly handled: because of the lack of actual development of the RPG elements, your interactions with him are stale and repetitive, as in the same point of conflict is gone over, seemingly resolved, and then addressed again.
It is ridiculous the PC release isn't lambasted for piss-poor performance by reviewers (mainstream urinalists excluded because their opinion isn't worth the excrement they sniff to come up with their opinions). I refuse to believe the accounts of apologist randoms when I have seen with my own eyes Dr. Disrespect, live on his Twitch stream, with the best PC build a man of his wealth can buy, only run the game at barely 100 FPS at medium to high settings at 1920x1080 resolution (he has a RTX 3090 btw)...pathetic. On every platform the game is sold on, the recommended graphics card is a GTX 1060, NOT MINIMUM, but RECOMMENDED. So apparently CDPR thinks the base experience is the aforementioned 30-50 FPS with graphics and rendering looking like something out of the previous century. To summarize, the game is poorly optimized regardless of PC rig, and the fault lies with the developer and publisher, not the consumer for believing the advertised specs (as the apologists would have you believe).
The world itself is impressive... not. The game is one of the worst optimized for PC in recent memory (and I've played Arkham Knight on release and a couple of the recent Assassin's Creed games), so you can't even experience and appreciate the game aesthetically. I have the PC components recommended by CDPR themselves, and my game runs on average 30-40 fps; 50 fps if I'm looking at the ground. At a certain point you realize it's all an elaborate farce; you can barely talk to any civilians and they just mindlessly walk straight ahead. No interactions or cool moments like in GTA, RDR, or even the likes of Skyrim and Fallout 4. Speaking of which, it is embarrassing that a game like Skyrim, released almost a decade ago, has exciting random events, like a thief trying to rob you or an assassin trying to ambush you, or the Dark Brotherhood sending you an ominous message after you nick one of their kills. Things like that bring weight to your choices, and honestly, playing through CB2077 only reminded me of older and better RPGs and games in general (Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect Trilogy, Witcher 3, Divinity Original Sin II, Deus Ex, KotoR 1 and 2, etc.). From what I have heard, there was a lot of content (including missions, characters, story arcs, entire game mechanics, etc.) that was cut from release; to what extent, I do not know, but I imagine it would be a lot...
Regarding NPC's and the world, if you shoot your gun in a crowd, for example, dozens of NPCs go into an identical crouching animation, and the cops can be defeated by standing against a wall as they always spawn behind you. It never feels like you're in a living in a tangible and ostensible world, but something like the Matrix: surrounded by lifeless automatons with predestined fates, which just breaks whatever immersion there is left to peddle. There is not even an attempt made to make the world and its occurrences seem spontaneous. Not to mention, many bugs and glitches prevent the player from finishing quests (sounds like a Bethesda experience, but at least on PC they provided the player with console commands and the tools to get past that in some way; the beautiful modding community also helped A LOT). All the aforementioned and more, break the verisimilitude of the game that was, as an advertised RPG, supposed to be VERY immersive.
The gameplay is unsatisfying and underwhelming. There's a heavy focus on gunplay but none of the guns themselves feel satisfying, because of the existence of a meta in a game that forces you to adopt certain playstyles over another: hacking is pointless and clunky, stealth is frustratingly near-impossible to pull off, and more.
And the endings...my god...what a way to invalidate every choice you made to get to the end:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*SPOILERS*
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The game has every single ending with the player dead and in despair (or alluded to dying at best). So much for a choice-dependent RPG, none of your choices have a meaningful or fulfilling impact on the setting or the people in it, let alone your own fate. The endings are more pointless than in Mass Effect 3 and even then, Bioware wanted to make amends and released an update to give an ending where Shepard survives (among other things). Before the curfuffle that was the ME 3 ending, it still drew more from player choices than CB2077: when your Shepard charged into the jaws of the enemy, your allies wanted you to survive, if you got an ending where you died, your lover grieved, and if your Shepard survived your friends missed you. The allies you gathered joined the battle, and despite EA's meandering, Bioware managed something wonderful. Does CB2077 have anything resembling such emotion derived from art? No.
This is a horrible game however way you slice it: gameplay, all aspects of writing, graphics, etc, all a huge disappointment and flawed at a design level. Apologists will keep defending these corporations and the corps will continue to sell us broken cars and try to fix them while we're test-driving. We must stand on our principles and call out anti-consumerist manure wherever and whenever it surfaces.
It's ridiculous that an attempt at a "true RPG" has less RPG elements than "The Witcher 3", a game released by the same company, with a character whose gender, race, moral alignment (for the most part), background, physique and general appearance, are already decided for you!
Mass Effect, a game released over a decade ago, gives you 2 instances with 3 choices each to customize your history and background before you even start the story, and unlike character customization in CB2077, in ME they actually affect your game experience, including but not limited to: giving characters unique dialogue when commenting on your achievements, unique dialogue for certain quests, and even a unique quest altogether depending on your choices; CB2077 gives you 3 "lifepaths" that simply amount to how you got into the city and nothing more.
Given alone that the CDPR list of possible spec configurations all run subpar, and nowhere resemble the footage we've seen, I'd say there is an argument to sue CDPR for false advertisement, but I don't have the money unfortunately. Perhaps I'll start with the $60 that I'll have once my refund goes through (been a week already).
If you don't have a good story, with interesting characters and intertwining plots and conflicts that you can become invested in, no immersive drama or brilliant voice acting...if you don't have good gameplay, or cool periodical gimmicks that can keep you engaged...if you don't have characters that you can fall in love with, hate, adore, admire, or respect...if you don't have any of that or not enough thereof, then how can we possibly, honestly, verily, call this botched abortion of a project a good game?
It would certainly seem, that no amount of patches or updates to fix the bugs and glitches will truly fix the game, because it is broken in terms of design of the written narrative and gameplay; to fix those two would require a rework from the ground up, a new game entirely...
A human can theoretically be entertained by anything (as evidenced by the glowing reviews from apologist hacks over the years, not just for this game) but that is no excuse for poor work. Why should we settle for mediocrity (or in this case hot garbage on a rotten leaf) when we know better that great art is preferable and possible? We have already done it better before for fuck's sake...more than once. Avatar the Last Airbender (the show) is a children's show but it's still written, directed, and acted well so that the children that grow up and learn from it, as well as newcoming adults, can look back fondly and still be entertained. Will the fundamental gameplay faults that are not as a result of abysmal optimization still be entertaining in the future? Will a contrived plot, stale characters, lackluster antagonist, lifeless world, and gameplay that skews you into a particular meta...be something you want to remember and invest your time in?
"Art dies when we forget why it must live."
God help us all if this is the future...because I don't like it. The Emperor has no clothes, and I'm tired of people telling me he does.
Post edited December 17, 2020 by TheDevoutRevanite
